such dreams…

big dreams…grandeur…

always thinking…one day…just a stroke away from something…yes…one stroke away…

and you move to this city…a big time joint where rents are high…pedestrians move to a cadence…taxis threaten to kill…landlords own the rights…get in-line…soup lines…assistance lines…movie lines…labor lines…picket lines…forget the voting lines…

the search for you continues… in other cities ’cause that one didn’t work out…nor the other…and certainly not the last…these vagabond shoes do not long to stay…stepping’cross country like Napoleon…burning wheat along the way…no prisoners…no evidence…keep marching…

skip town… books…razors…some old socks… picture of mom…shots of Paris…Bill Evans albums…some Miles too…scratched from the needle…left behind…neatly placed on a rented mattress where bedbugs played hopscotch and boozey broads conversed over bottles at three in the morning under covers as incense burned…

goodbye…goodbye…did this life choose you…or did you choose it…doesn’t matter…doesn’t matter…

because the city is the city is the city….and brothers get killed on the South side of Fort Wayne just as brothers do in Chicago…St. Louis…Cleveland…Jamaica Queens…Compton…The Tenderloin…take your pick…

the city is the city is the city…and a corpse is a corpse is a corpse…

the walls are crumbling…

take cover…